New Regulations Hasten Manufacture Of Electric Vehicles

April 2, 1995|The New York Times

The Big Three are all working hard on electric cars, not out of enthusiasm, but to comply with an impending requirement in California - since adopted by New York and Massachusetts - that 2 percent of the cars offered for sale by the 1998 model year have "zero emissions."

The auto manufacturers' hardest work on the issue has sometimes seemed to be in court-rooms, but they have failed to persuade judges to overturn the rules. The Big Three are still trying to negotiate with clean-air regulators, but they are also building cars.

The General Motors Corp. appears to be ahead of the Ford Motor Co. and the Chrysler Corp. A GM subsidiary, GM Hughes Electronics, builds the computer control module for the Impact and also sells a system in wide use by other electric car teams. And the Impact body is an achievement, with an extremely slippery drag coefficient of 0.19, light weight and tires with very low rolling resistance.

Ford's entry, the Ecostar van, won an electric car race last year, the Tour de Sol. It has a high-energy power storage system, sodium sulfur batteries, a technology that Ford invented in the 1960s.

Still, Ford says it has gained considerable operating experience from a fleet of Ecostars that it has leased to commercial users. And the company is negotiating to sell "gliders" - Ford chassis with no engines - to electric-car converters.

The cars would still carry the Ford oval trademark, could be sold by Ford dealers, and could help meet Ford's 2 percent quota.

Chrysler is a step farther behind. It is expected to announce soon a successor to its electric mini-van, a vehicle with acceleration so excruciatingly slow that Lee Iacocca made fun of it when he introduced it at the New York Auto Show a few years ago.

In contrast to the big auto makers, the Solectria Corp., based in Wilmington, Mass., is driven by enthusiasm for the technology. But it does not expect to sell many cars to individuals, even ardent environmentalists, in the near future, because its costs are so high. (The company starts its vehicle conversions by throwing away perfectly serviceable gasoline engines.) Solectria has a new ground-up design made of lightweight composites, and hopes to market the vehicle widely in partnership with Boston Edison.

If you can't wait to have an electric vehicle, there is always the option of yanking the engine out of an old car and converting it yourself. The California Energy Commission, in a national survey in January, found 14 companies that sell conversion kits.